@Nitin
I agree, I’m sure the best research comes from people working together in both the wet and dry lab. I’m going to hug the next person I see wearing a lab coat.

We are all PROUD to be Bioinformaticians ( Next to God Father )…

While I admit that we are often misunderstood and many wetlab people do not appreciate our work, I believe the blame is on our side too. I see many times people who forget that there’s a “bio” prefix in here, and neglect the biological side of their work. How can we deserve a respect if there are cases where bioinformaticians don’t distinguish between two beta-barrels with different number of strands or treat DNA sequence as protein sequence with limited alphabet (for more inspiring examples see archives of journals focused on biocomputing/bioinformatics)?

It’s not only politics, high self-importance of wetlab people, but also work called “bioinformatics” that’s too often of questionable quality. I believe all three contribute significantly to that problem.

Pedro and Neil both said that there are lab biologists who do appreciate bioinformatics, but my personal opinion is that they are in the minority. Though as both say, when dry and wet work together the results are more than the sum of their parts.

Another interesting point of discussion was about the time it takes to do bioinformatics work. If you do some work for a biologist, if it only takes you a few hours does that mean it’s easy? I think the answer is no, because you’ve put the weeks, and months in learning how to do the analysis correctly. Getting good enough to do the analysis, so that it looks like it’s easy should still mean that you get credit for it, after all have much time have you saved the biologist. Or could they even be able to do it themselves? I think this is something similar to what Kieren was saying.

This is turning into a bit of rant, however I think the political issues that are preventing more wet and dry lab people working together is a bit a waste. Which is in turn usually a waste of public money.

I’d also like to say that person in the picture is not me. A few of my friends have asked this, Kieren in particular asked if I had photoshopped a beard onto myself? I’m also not married either, i.e. there’s a wedding ring on his finger. Maybe that’s why he’s sad? Having said that, I’m not opposed to marriage, it’s just that I’ve had a few bad relationships in the past. Time to stop writing.

I definitely agree that people doing bioinformatics are at the forefront of the biological sciences - being able to look at the problem at all possible levels of molecular organisation is a valuable skill.

He gives me a region of interest and I generate a list of interesting candidates…easy! Unfortunately, that is exactly how it appears to most of them. Their appreciation for your coding skills, database knowledge, SVMs, web services, workflows, linux commands and your ability to automate analyses that save them months of time just don’t exist.

However, there are the select few that do and they are the ones that have made an effort to understand your area of expertise. Where would we be without bioinformatics?

Claiming it is ‘not proper science’ is drastically inaccurate as science by its very definition means ‘to know’, it is about knowledge acquisition through observation and experimentation. This is why bioinformatics is a rigorous, intensive, multidisciplinary ’science’.

Equally though, there are plenty of biologists who realise the importance of bioinformatics and are happy to give us credit for our skill set. So befriend them and ignore the others! They’ll soon get the message.

It’s also important to stay focused on biological problems and promote what you do at every opportunity, so as the relevance can’t be ignored. You’ll never convince some people of the benefits of R/gnuplot/scripting over Excel but when you casually mention in your group talk: “so, I took all of GenBank, fed it through my pipeline and here are the candidates” (one slide), they’ll see for themselves. Eventually.